Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs.

Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run and grow your business with easy customizable

themes that let you build your brand, marketing tools that get your products out there.

Integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time. From startups to scaleups, online,

in person and on the go. Shopify is made for

entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup.

Season 10 of the Art Curious podcast is sponsored by Anchorlight. For more information about their

programs and residences, please visit Anchorlight. For more information about their programs and residences,

please visit Anchorlightrolly.com. There are lots of questions that come up in every art history

classroom or lecture hall, and we hear them again and again. What is art, really? And how do you

define it? Why is the Mona Lisa smiling? What happened to the winged victory's arms? And then there's another one that you'll hear, or that you'll even think yourself, especially if you are a fan of a particular Renaissance master's work. It's a question that I have personally heard being asked point-blank in class and whispered

in sacred spaces in Rome and in Florence. Visitors straining their necks to stare up at a ceiling

and others sneaking peaks at gleaming marble tombs have asked this question. Why? They wonder.

Why are Michelangelo's women so, well, so unwomanly?

The colossal sibyls and Old Testament heroines that Michelangelo painted on the ceiling of the

Sistine Chapel in Rome, for example, and his marble personification of night on the tomb of

Giuliano de Medici in in Florence have many of the same

attributes. Essentially, these ladies are cut. The Cumae and Sybil has bigger guns than most pro athletes,

and Knights got a six-pack in quads so large that it looks like she spends her downtime on the elliptical.

Michelangelo's ladies have the most beautiful, angelically pure faces. But when stripped down,

many of them look very, very muscular, to an extent that they almost appear manly. And then,

there's the problem of knight's left breast. The thing looks almost tacked on, like a misshapen afterthought.

...